Before HN Jewelry: How Years of Jewelry Inspection Shaped My Eye for Q

“Before I ever designed a ring under HN Jewelry, my world looked very different.
Most people don’t know this, but I didn’t enter the jewelry industry as a designer or as a seller. I started as something much less glamorous, far more unusual — a jewelry inspector.”

I spent 10+ years inspecting factories around the world — Hong Kong, China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Italy. I examined more than one million pieces of jewelry — seeing the worst workmanship, the best craftsmanship, and everything in between.

An Unexpected Door Opens

In Hong Kong, that job barely existed. Most testing labs examine anything except jewelry: toys, household products, clothing, even plastic bags. Old colleagues used to joke,

“One day pencils, the next day stickers, the day after plastic bags — but jewelry?”

That was the environment I walked into.

After returning to Hong Kong, I learned that a global testing company was opening a brand-new Jewelry Inspection Department. They were hiring just two inspectors. A manager flew in from the United States to conduct interviews in person.

I never expected that moment to change my life.

I was hired — and over time, that same U.S.-based manager would later help me open my own inspection company as a subcontractor, introducing additional international clients and trusting me with more responsibility than I ever imagined early in my career.

That trust changed everything — and it would later shape everything I built at HN Jewelry.

Why Brands Needed a Third Party

Before we even stepped into a factory, people often asked a simple question: “Why does a retailer need to hire an outside inspection company? Why don’t they just send their own QC team?”

The truth is, neither option works well.

If a retailer sends their own inspectors, the standard becomes too strict — sometimes beyond what is reasonable for mass production. They inspect with “zero tolerance,” which makes factories terrified to produce, constantly worried that even a tiny, harmless imperfection will fail the entire shipment. No factory can operate like that for long.

On the other hand, if the retailer relies on the factory’s QC, the opposite problem appears. Factory QC inevitably protects the factory. Their job is to ship the goods out, not to question them. Even if something is not ideal, they tend to let it pass. After all, rejecting their own goods means rejecting their own work.

That is why companies hire third-party inspectors — people like us. We act as the middle ground. The balance point. We carry responsibility on both sides.

We have to protect the retailer’s reputation, and at the same time, understand how jewelry is actually made so we judge fairly. That balance — not too strict, not too lenient — is harder than most people think.

This is why our professional eye mattered. This is why retailers trusted us. And this is why the job required someone who could understand craftsmanship deeply, and make decisions that affected thousands of pieces of jewelry at a time.

That was my everyday life — long before HN Jewelry began.

Learning Jewelry the Hard Way

From that point on, my life became a cycle of factories, flights, and inspection tables.

My job was simple on paper but complicated in reality: major retailers needed us to inspect their jewelry before it shipped worldwide. If a supplier in Hong Kong, China, India, Italy, Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand, or anywhere else finished production, we were sent to their factory to do the final quality check. Random sampling, gemstone verification, metal stamp inspection — but most importantly, workmanship.

I learned how jewelry was truly made — not in textbooks or design studios, but on factory floors. I saw where craftsmanship excelled, where shortcuts happened, and how different cultures approached quality.

Some months I flew so often between Italy and Turkey that I would wake up on the plane and not remember which country I was heading to.

There was the time in India when the inspection table was covered with flies and we had to keep slapping them away while examining diamond rings.

Some stories were passed down between inspectors. One involved an inspection in India where a gun was placed on the table without explanation, the story alone was enough to make me uneasy. It stayed with me as a quiet reminder of how exposed this work can sometimes feel.

I once went to Bali — a place most people associate with luxury resorts, beautiful villas, and high-end spending. But my Bali was very different. I was taken deep into an old village where jewelry workshops had no modern machines, no polish, no comfort. Everything was handmade. Tools were worn. Processes were slow. The owner told me many locals had little formal education — working with their hands was how they survived, how they built a life.

Standing there, watching raw metal slowly take shape under human hands, I understood something that Jewelry is not just about beauty. It is about labor, risk, discipline — and the unseen lives behind every finished piece.

There were moments when, before any inspection had begun, a supplier would attempt to place something wrapped in newspaper into my hands. I didn’t accept it. I didn’t ask what it was.

“Please… make it pass,” they whispered, even though their jewelry hadn’t been inspected yet. Ironically, sometimes the goods were perfectly fine. Over time, I came to understand that in some places, gestures like this were simply part of how inspections had traditionally been approached.

I inspected pieces that were beautiful, pieces that were terrible, and pieces that were outright dangerous — like the time I found a sharp metal pin inside a bracelet that could seriously injure the customer.

There were factories that delayed goods, argued standards, or pretended problems didn’t exist. There were secrets brands asked me to keep information they didn’t want factories to know, so quality could be controlled quietly and properly.

These were the moments when I learned what “quality” really means from what could go wrong in real life.

From Inspector to Founder

These experiences became the foundation of my craft. I learned how jewelry is made in different countries, who excels at what process, where mistakes happen, and how to predict quality issues before they appear.

By the time I founded HN Jewelry, I had already spent years learning from the inside — not just how jewelry should look, but how it should behave. How it should feel, how it should last, and how it should be made safely and beautifully.

None of this appears on the surface of a finished piece of jewelry.

But all of it matters.

And the things I saw… became stories I still carry today.

People often ask why I am so strict about diamond selection, prong structure, or millimeter alignment.

The truth is simple:
I’ve seen what happens when quality fails.
And I’ve seen what happens when quality shines.

HN Jewelry wasn’t born from a desire to sell jewelry. It was born from years of seeing what happens when quality is compromised — and what happens when craftsmanship is respected.

When I finally started HN Jewelry, I carried those lessons with me:

I reject more stones than I use
I obsess over structure, not just appearance
I care about millimeters, balance, and longevity
I believe honesty matters more than speed

Every piece we create today carries a little of that inspection history within it.

I didn’t plan this journey.

But looking back now, everything makes sense.

HN Jewelry exists because of those years — the flights, the factories, the inspections, and the quiet responsibility of standing in the middle.

This is only the beginning of the story.